How to install Blender in CentOS 5

Blender is popular open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D content creation. Here is how you can install Blender on CentOS 5 (enterprise version of Linux) and equivalent to RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.

This mini-guide assumes you have a working knowledge on yum / yumex.

To install Blender you need to have epel and rpmforge repositories installed and enabled in your system. You also need to have yum-priorities plugin installed.

In priorities configuration have rpmforge ahead of epel repository.

Sounds complicated? Let me provide a minimal configuration to allow you to use both the repositories.

/etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - $basearch
#baseurl=https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL
priority=10

File: /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag
#baseurl = https://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/$basearch/dag
mirrorlist = https://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1
priority=9

Remember to add lower priorities to your CentOS base and update repositories.

With that in place, installing Blender is just a simple:

yum install blender

Note: I installed Blender in 64 bit version of CentOS 5.

That is simple, isn’t it? Let us know your experience in using Blender under CentOS 5 in comments below.